!!! – Valve Releases Video Of Steam Controller In Action

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We’ve heard tell of the Steam controller‘s ins and outs (and ups and downs and lefts and rights and Bs and As and starts) from many a developer, but still skepticism reigns. And with good reason: Valve’s haptics-powered Franken-pad is kinda bonkers. But now, at the very least, we can see – with eyes or echolocation – how it functions moment-to-moment. Go below to see it power through Portal 2, Civilization V, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Papers Please.

Seems solid, no? It’s definitely versatile. I’ll give Valve that much. It’ll definitely take some getting used to, but I could see myself piloting my way through the future with one of those if a mouse-and-keyboard setup isn’t readily available. That’s my big concern, really: this all looks nice enough, but each demonstration made my brain scream, “YEAH, BUT MOUSE AND KEYBOARD WOULD FEEL SO MUCH BETTER.” Sorry about the caps. It’s all screaming up there.

Then again, these are legacy mode games, so of course mouse-and-keyboard is preferable over thumb-warring them into submission. But then, the Steam controller is supposed to be a substitute for our setup of choice, so I don’t really see it getting the upper hand in many genres. Does it look better than a standard gamepad? Definitely. I’m still skeptical about the effectiveness of haptic feedback, but you can’t argue with that precisio, and we haven’t even what the touch screen’s capable of yet. My issue is that Valve’s pretty obviously trying to get dyed-in-the-wool PC gamers aboard its living room Steam engine first, but I don’t really see any compelling reason to modify my current setup. Not yet, anyway.

I suppose I might be interested if I played more games that tangibly benefited from a drive-in-movie-theater-worthy screen and – yuck – other nearby humans, but there aren’t many of those on PC these days. That said, Valve plans to release videos like this regularly, so I’d love to see one that includes, say, TowerFall and Samurai Gunn. Or Nidhogg. Or Divekick. Or or or… OK, maybe we’ve got some good living room games after all. But I would argue that Steam’s living room conquest still lacks a mighty leader – a killer app to stand at the head of the charge – so it’s a tough sell for me. Does Valve have something else up its sleeve? Time will tell. (And also it’s probably Half-Life.)

196 Comments

The trackpad button layout is configurable through haptics, so in principle you could have a dozen buttons 30 degrees apart on each trackpad. More realistically, you’re looking at 4 buttons on each trackpad that feel like actual buttons under your thumbs.

The Steam controller has, conservatively: 8 trackpad, 4 face, 4 shoulder + 2 paddles at the back, (possibly) 4 touchscreen buttons and three control buttons (start/select/back?). Considering that you don’t need to hold down a button to look/move and that you can combine presses, that’s plenty of buttons for nearly any PC game that isn’t Dwarf Fortress. The control problems the controller will need to solve are not a scarcity of inputs.

As for the control paradigm: I don’t see it beating M+KB in the precision or speed department, but at some point we have to advance past the dual thumbstick velocity controls, which are especially awful for FPSes I’m especially terrible with at FPSes. This looks like a worthy successor, and if it takes a little training to adapt our thumbs to this, I’m up for it.

It really is a preposterous claim, I agree. EDIT: I just realized that you probably aren’t being sarcastic. Forgetting where I am for a second.

I use an xbox controller frequently for pc gaming. I’m counting 4 colored buttons, 4 dpad directions, 2 triggers, 2 bumpers, 2 analog stick clicks, and 2 start/select buttons. Let us ignore “analog stick directions”, as they are equivalent, and not buttons. So that is 16 buttons xbox to valves 17 (“4+4+2+4+3”). Which is nice, except that I frequently have to map one of the trigger buttons to create alternate sets for other groups (i.e. using left trigger as cntrl+’other button’), and I still run out of buttons for games that aren’t designed (limited) for use with the controller.

Then I have this’un here Logitech G13, relic of mah forebears what used to sit in front of a deskbox computa and drink moonshine. It has only 1 dpad, so we’ll subtract 4 buttons for wasd. That leaves it with 21 buttons, and I still had to use the cntrl+button trick to get 40+ buttons out of it instead, AND I would use a mouse with several buttons in my other hand. And I would still run out of buttons in MMOs.

I’m all for arguing that kind of game design is outdated and bad, but to say that 17 buttons is enough for any pc game except DF is a bit silly.

Well, just because haptic feedback can make you feel a button, doesn’t mean it creates a reactive surface beneath it. It can feel like a million buttons and won’t matter if the mechanics beneath only recognize you clicking on the left or right half.

Also I imagine using trackpad buttons while also using them for movement and camera would be pretty impractical. 14 buttons still sounds good, but considering face and touchscreen buttons (8 total) need to be accessed again by the thumbs busy with the trackpads.

Now look at something like DOTA2 where you need a minimum of 4 spell hotkeys and 6 inventory hotkeys, plus the usual LMB/RMB. It also has some major convenience buttons for stuff like shop, courier, denying, radial menu, group micromanagement and map pings. The pacing doesn’t let you take your time or be imprecise either.

Then again, I always did like how HL2 juggled like 12 weapons on half the space. So maybe some tricks can help.

Well aiming with xbox360 gamepad WITHOUT aiming assist would be a chore.
I haven’t played that many fps with it, but in BL 2 without aiming assist it would have taken a lot more to take aim and i would have died a lot more often.
That’s the problem i have with the dual thumbstick gamepads, they SUCK for FPS and they basically rely on auto-aim to make up for their handicap. It’s like having the crappiest mouse and having to use auto-aim to be on par with better ones.

If it were just that.
The bad aiming with joypads also lead to the dominance of spray`n`pray shooting, where you have to whittle down somebodys health.
Because you cant target precisely, shooters in general became slower and more random.

you could use one of the trackpads as face buttons but then you lose what could be used as a right stick. Any games that require a movement and a turning pad as well as multiple accessible face buttons (like Assassin’s Creed or any other 3rd person action adventure game) wouldn’t work very well. That being said, I haven’t actually tried them so maybe I’m missing something. It does seem like the xbox or playstation controller still win over this.

it had frikkin’ mouse acceleration, understandable since it’s pretty much obligatory on a touchpad. Every time they wanted to aim at a head they had to sit still. I can do that equally fast/faster with an analog gamepad.

Then you must not be using a standard controller as an analogue stick is effectively about equivalent to a 255 DPI mouse. Neutral is an input of 0, moving the stick all the way over is an input of 255, meaning there are only 255 possible variations in speed of the movement of that analogue (and that is assuming the game adjusts the speed of the cursor/camera in each of those notches, most do not modify the speed until you’ve moved 5 to 10 notches).

Meanwhile those trackpads are aiming for a DPI similar to a gaming mouse, which is at least in the thousands.

And if you were playing with that stick on a console, there’s auto-aim.

So either you’re using a non-standard analogue stick or you’ve managed to make a normal analogue stick work in a way it’s not electronically able to, you tell me which.

And I’ve gone over to PC gaming on my couch, and find M+KB to be sub-optimal. I particularly find that it bugs the wrist on my mouse hand a lot. I still do it, but I would switch over to a controller if the loss of control was minimal.

This is called a niche market… it might not be for you, but it’s a pretty clever move from Valve’s standpoint… They are trying to make living room pc’s and therefor they create living room PC controls….

You seem to have missed the point way back at the announcement (maybe go back and read it?). Keyboard and mouse from your sofa is not ideal, and I should know because I do it. I’ve been looking forward to someone coming up with something that comes even close to m&k, and finally, it’s on its way.

Problem: How can I play some of the games in my library on my sick ginormous TV in the living room without running ridiculous amounts of extensions or putting my gaming tower in the living room along with said TV?

Solution: Steam OS, streams the game from your PC library to your beautiful television. Steam controller gives you a living room friendly (and ergonomic solution since a Mouse & Keyboard on the coffee table strains your neck and shoulders -first hand knowledge) device to control it all from.

If you don’t have a problem similar to this, you don’t see how any of this is a solution and well… That’s OK :)

I have a friend who grew up on a console that is much, much more comfortable on a joypad for fps games than a mouse and keyboard. It’s not an I’m better thing either, he acknowledges it is probably better, just, he is more familiar and comfortable with the joystick set up.

Like Jrodman, when I started using a mouse for FPS games I found it way out of control, like I was looking at stuff in ways that were not supposed to be. I played the revamped Duke 3D a couple weeks ago and I got that feeling again; of course, now I have good accuracy and I can control the thing like I was born doing it, but man is it disturbing to see the 2D sprites get all distorted when you look at them at certain angles.

Very much this – it feels pretty obtuse to say ‘there is no problem this is solving’. Not solving a problem you have is not the same as ‘there is no problem’. They’ve been pretty clear in their three announcements this is about making your PC Steam library accessible in your living room. I for one would like to do that, and this looks like part of the solution to make that easier.

I’ve been playing a lot of PC games on the couch in the last couple of years since I hooked my PC up to my telly and I always go back to my desk to play FPS. I’ve been waiting for something like this, exactly what I was looking for.

I’d also be interested to see them demo the controller with a top-down isometric game :P Take your pick of favourite top-down isometric game… DnD classics (BG, IWD, etc), Fallout 1 or 2, Commandos series, Desperados series, etc or go newer (the Wasteland 2 beta perhaps) – just to see if the complexity of turn-based or real-time-with-pause (traditional strongholds for Mouse + KB) can be effectively handled by this controller. In theory, you don’t need the keyboard to play most of these games (save for the occasional “Esc” key for the menu perhaps)…

With a reliable Bluetooth / wireless receiver (I’ve been using a Logitech one for years and years), a wireless keyboard and mouse is perfectly serviceable on the couch so for me, this controller will really need to show an advantage or two over regular analogue controllers *and* mouse + keyboard (since I have both already) :D

you make $27h…good for you! I make up to $85h working from home. My story is that I quit working at shoprite to work online and with a little effort I easily bring in around $45h to $85h…heres a good example of what I’m doing,… http://www.max68.com

‘That’s my big concern, really: this all looks nice enough, but each demonstration made my brain scream, “YEAH, BUT MOUSE AND KEYBOARD WOULD FEEL SO MUCH BETTER.”’

Yes, yes, me too, however… This will be far better than a 360 pad for playing games on my sofa, especially as it’ll be designed to work with Big Picture and, with any luck, will work as a mouse for navigating a desktop for those annoyingly not-infrequent-enough times when Big Picture breaks or when a game has a launcher or whatever.

Edit: so yeah, it’s not going to replace my keyboard and mouse (for most games) when I’m at my desk, but will replace my 360 controller and will make me more willing to switch to my TV and play games bigger.

Yeah, agreed – this isn’t designed to replace the KB+Mouse, but I think for those who like to play some slower-paced PC games on the couch with others in the room, this is ideal. I played through Amnesia, Portal, Antichamber, and a whole lot of old point-and-click adventure games in the living room by laying on carpet with a keyboard resting on my stomach and a mouse on the carpet. I would absolutely LOVE to have this to do that kind of gaming on the couch instead.

Exactly this. It’s not meant to replace the Mouse/KB on a desktop (or even laptop), but provide a better experience than a traditional gamepad.

In that case, i think it wins. I have a 360 controller hooked up to my PC (for games like Batman and Sleeping Dogs), but i’d rather buy a Steam Controller than an Xbone or PS4 controller when they stop making games for the 360.

For me, the big question isn’t simply “Can it replace a mouse and keyboard?” but “Does it have a place in a system that already has a mouse, keyboard, and Xbox-compatible controller?” — I don’t need a mouse substitute, and I don’t need a joystick substitute, because I already have a mouse and a joystick. But a dual-trackpad-with-haptic-feedback device seems like the sort of thing that might be able to transcend being a substitute for anything and have value of its own, once people figure out how to use it right.

I remember when Quake first came out, and at first everyone tried to play it like they were playing Doom — that is, mostly in a single plane, occasionally using a pair of tilt-up/tilt-down keys when necessary. Then one by one they realized that they could play a lot better if they reconfigured the controls to what we now think of as the standard, with one hand doing all the movement, and mouselook turned on all the time. Once you tried this, it was clearly the right way to play first-person shooters, but not even the designers of the game seemed to have realized this while making it. So anyway, maybe this new contraption will enable some similar transformation in the way we play stuff. It seems possible. But we still have no idea how.

Yeah, I can’t wait to see what people (Valve, developers, players) do with this when it’s released. The whole thing – Steam Machines, Steam OS – excites me greatly, not just because of what it means initially (as I can already play my PC games on my TV) but rather because of how it might shape or develop the industry. And because I’ll finally be able to play point and clicks whilst sitting on a more comfortable seat. But what if we get PC games with actual split screen support, or cheap £100 Steam Machines with the bare minimum hardware for streaming? There’s a lot of potential.

They’re talking about a £100 steam box (potentially free in the future) that acts as a dummy terminal for streaming games from your proper PC elsewhere in the house. If it works well, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, it would be a superb option. Personally I’d rather just have 2 PCs but if it means I only need to upgrade one and reap the benefits with both then that’s certainly a win.

As an added bonus, it will allow SteamOS to play any Windows based game by streaming it from a Windows PC.

2 bits of pointless dead-end tech which most people won’t have and so no-one will target them :)

That’s mean – I know – the controller just might work (tho I think it’s price will probably kill it – it will either be expensive and decent or cheap and crap) but the OR is a dead-end just waiting for no customers…

The thing is, mouse + keyboard is not a good input method. The mouse is a good input method – far superior to joysticks in aiming and camera control. The keyboard is just a device designed for writing that we use because it’s next to the mouse and has lots of keys. A gamepad is better than a keyboard because its buttons are more distinctive and designed to be easily identified. PC gamers usually don’t notice this because they compare M+K with pads, and M+K wins because the mouse is so superior.

Gaming with mouse and keyboard is like driving a car that you steer with a wheel and accelerate by spinning a crank.

The thing is, many peripherals have tried to usurp the throne of the left hand over the years, and yet none of them have gained the traction to be semi-standard, like 360 pads are. So I can’t help but feel that they’re missing some killer advantage of the keyboard beyond ubiquity and touch-type familiarity, be it its text-entry prowess, or having way more buttons than you have fingers, or something. Because, sure, otherwise it’s a bit of a weird and suboptimal layout with purely digital buttons, and it seems that there should be room for improvement there.

Why is it even relevant that there may or may not be mouse acceleration enabled? All that matters is that you couldn’t aim that well on a gamepad. You’re literally the only person in these comments who thinks that aiming looks worse than it would be on pad.

It’s not about being pro or anti Valve, I personally hate a lot of things about Steam, think Half Life is a bit overrated, and won’t be getting one of these controllers (because IMO it can’t compete with mouse/keyboard and I only want to game at my desk), or a SteamBox, or using SteamOS.

It’s just about looking at the aiming shown in the video and saying ‘is that possible on a 360 pad’, and IMO the answer is no.

apart from Civ V i didnt see anything in that video that i couldnt do with a gamepad just as well.
portal with a pad is perfect as it is, and i do just fine going up against m/kb players in CS:GO.
Not saying strategy games wouldnt be better but obviously racing and third person I think would be better with pads.

When I saw that game come up I was thinking it was an odd choice. Then they described what was happening and I was on board. If I hadn’t seen it, just hearing the idea would have sounded dumb to me but it looks really good.

No, you don’t understand why *you* don’t need this thing. I, and I’d imagine most PC gamers, am comfortable sitting at my desk, using mouse and keyboard. I’m more comfortable slouched in my piss-yellow upholstered gaming throne in front of my television with a controller in my hands. Current gamepads, however, were not designed with any modicum of PC functionality in mind unless developers go for that or it’s multiplatform. This is a customizable solution to that. Not a catchall for every game I could imagine projecting to my TV, but a nice solution.

Judging from your sarcasm, no, you won’t be doing such a thing. But it holds appeal for others. I’m ridiculously sick of all the “This does not apply to me and thus is awful and worthless” mentality that keeps rippling through the gaming community.

I would use this on a plane; I would use it on a train; I would use it with an Oculus Rift; I wouldn’t use it on a couch, because K&M are still better there. Solid advancement in controller tech, though. Well done, Valve.

I still want to see it play games that were developed with the classic, DualShock like controller design in mind. Specially the Batman: Arkham Whatever games and Sonic Generations. Also some sidescroller platformers. I want to see how the controller adapts to these kinds of games. I bought a X360 controller for my PC just to play games like these.

Yeah, if it’s to become The One Gamepad, it needs to deal nicely with games designed for the console controllers. The main issue is probably going to be the four face buttons that are normally operated by the right thumb. If I understand it right those could be mapped to “clickable” locations on the right trackpad, while the whole track pad is still used to emulate the controller’s right stick. How that works out in practice will be interesting to see.

Games designed specifically for this controller should be able to do some really interesting things with the wealthy of touch surfaces and fancy haptic feedback. Which will definitely be fun to play with, but without market penetration could easily be forever limited to little technical demos.

Controllers that use XInput exist already; whether XBox, Logitech or other party. I can fully imagine Valve thinking “let’s not bother with an already saturated market”.

I can see a SteamOS box having both this and a XInput compatible controller both plugged in. If games are already designed with XBox style controls, then just use that controller. If they are not, we now possibly have something better than an XBox controller trying to do something it can’t.

I’m pretty sure this is not design for people (like me) who are happy at their desk with the combo of mouse/keyboard and gamepad. It’s for people who want to use their PC in the living room on a couch.

Super Meat Boy was configured so that the track pad acted as a single button, the jump button. The run button was set to shoulders. The left trackpad worked as a standard D-pad, but the task doesn’t really touch on how many different “buttons” can be recognized simultaneously. (Even if the device can only recognize one press, you can emulate a d-pad as long as you have eight locations.)

He was able to play Spelunky without issue, but while he says that the Steam pad is find for precision, it again doesn’t really get into how well it handles simultaneous presses. If Valve wanted to show that aspect off, then they should probably use the controller with a fighting game, which depending on the game can require any combination of face buttons be pressed and recognized simultaneously. And hardcore fighting game fans can be a good test of button recognition in general.

What I immediately think is they could have a clip on plastic guard for the right pad with protruding buttons. We all know that the pad is capable of accepting analogue button input. The left stick isnt really used by games that rely on those buttons for obvious reasons, so if it can be done, I don’t see why that wouldnt be an ideal solution.

Yeah, there are some types of game where it probably won’t work well. For instance, Super Meat Boy, or Street Fighter. Anything where you need precise directional control or where the face buttons feature heavily. For those I’m sure you’d be better connecting a gamepad.

looks interesting, but the one thing that concerns me is, if you watch the controller during the portal 2 section, when turning around he slides his thumb to one edge of the trackpad then picks it up moves it back to the opposite side and slides it to the edge again and repeats this just to make a 180 degree turn. this seems like it could become very tedious to me, whereas a traditional gamepad has you push the joystick in the direction you want to turn and hold it there.

That would just be simulating a joystick instead of mouse with the trackpad. The controller is perfectly capable of doing that, but you lose the precision of the mouse emulation.
The more optimal solution would be a quick 180 turn button – something that should be fairly simple since the controller is simulating mouse movement anyway. Should be able to configure it to simulate a specific range of mouse movement on a single button press.

He did say the say settings weren’t optimised or customised for the pad, that they were just on one-to-one keyboard+mouse controls. I’m guessing if things had been set up differently, he wouldn’t have needed to do that.

Given what the commentary was saying during the Portal 2 segment, I’m thinking that the sensitivity of the trackpads will be adjustable. After all, you need to do two full swipes on a mouse to do a 180 degree turn on some FPS’s default mouse sensitivity settings. The first thing I do in any game is turn them up.

I wonder if it would be possible to make the outer ring of the track pad enable a sort of semi joystick mode. so when you drag your finger all the way to the edge and into the circle it keep going when you hold it there.

It certainly makes couch playing a lot easier with Civ5. While the couch has a decent flat arm, its just not as comfortable versus mousing at your desk and chair. A MMO like mouse can give you enough mouse keys to mouse play Civ5.

You can already play civ5 purely with a simple mouse…there is just one problem that always destroyed this ambition: how the f can I input amounts when trading?! I still don’t get why there are no arrows to increment/decrement gold amounts…

I’d really like to see a demonstration with racing games now. My mind seems to think these would still work better with a traditional thumbstick setup.

If that’s the case it’s still looking pretty interesting and maybe it’s best to create a niche product than try and cover all bases. I’m glad to see more controllers on the market as it’s been pretty annoying to have to give up my favorite gamepad for loss of support over the 360 controller. Hopefully a future of controller choice is brewing again :)

Okay, then show what underrated companies are coming up with an improvement to gamepads as opposed to rehashing the same (inferior) designs we’ve had for more than a decade.
Can you name even one? Maybe not that overrated then.

You’re welcome to your opinion but I disagree. The aiming shown there, while not rivaling a mouse, looks beyond what is possible on a gamepad to me. The important thing is the ability to swipe to get quick movement, and the trackpad area being larger than the range of movement of a stick.

I’m genuinely surprised it’s that good, I honestly thought it would suck.

Their touchpads are a straight up improvement because they can function as mouse AND joystick. That’s the definition of improvment. It does the same thing the gamepads do AND it does more in addition to that.

Nope. Console controllers need copious amounts of autoaim to be playable. For example, Call of Duty will lock on to the nearest enemy when you ADS in single player and stick to enemies in multiplayer.

The Counterstrike part that you characterize as “sad” is pretty much how Counterstrike is played. You have to be crouched and still if you want good accuracy. Apparently because he is not pro at Counterstrike, the controller sucks, even though he was still faster than most controller players minus autoaim. Not to mention the accuracy with Civ 5 and Papers, Please that the console controllers could never hope to match.

Hell, I was more accurate playing Deus Ex with my old laptop’s trackpad than I was the few times I have tried playing an FPS with a controller without autoaim. Speaking of trackpads, if thumbsticks are so far superior, why did laptop manufacturers get rid of the keyboard nub in favor of the trackpad?

Overrated? I’m not getting that vibe at all. Remember the big console reveal and the sharing games not allowed talk? Well, Valve is working on allowing sharing of Digital(!) purchases and I haven’t heard much talk about that at all. If anything media tends to ignore valve in favor of more pop news.

Inconsequential? You friend gets your entire steam library as his/her own is inconsequential?

According to the page once you have another user added your game library shows up in their steam like it was their library. They can play online and get achievements. The only catch is you can’t both play the same shared game at the same time, which isn’t really a catch.

You’re highly misinformed. For one thing, a user’s entire library is not going to be available to his/her friends — the publishers will get final say as to what games give sharing access, so “entire library” is a misnomer. For another thing, Ion Tichy is right: library sharing is severely limited. As soon as you log into a game in your Steam account, your friends lose access to your library.

Steam Sharing is a band-aid that Valve came up with to cover the gaping wound full of complaints about Steam’s restrictive account management policies, and it’s not worthy of the sycophantic attention the press has been giving it.

I want to see this thing hacked for use with audio programs and DAWs. I’ve already seen a video editor happily working away with an N52 controller. If the Steam controller is flexible enough, it should move pretty quickly into a host of unintended applications.

I’m a bit more optimistic now that I’ve actually seen the Steam Controller in action, but still don’t think it’s going to be the perfect solution to couch-and-keyboard gaming that Valve apparently think it is. I want to see more specific games in action, like Batman Arkham City or Need For Speed.

Ultimately though, the deciding factor for me is going to be price, and I have a feeling Valve are going to be charging a pretty penny for this thing.

Yeah I think for something like Batman (or any fighting game) this is probably worse than a 360 pad, just because of the lack of well placed face buttons. Having virtual buttons on the right pad isn’t going to feel as nice as real buttons you can feel under your thumb. It’s clearly designed for mouse driven games.

The question is why don’t they put the right trackpad where the right stick is on the 360 pad and still have the four face buttons in the regular position? Even with the size of the trackpads, I reckon there’s room. You could probably fit a D-Pad on there too.

I see this and wish I turned all those shit shooting sessions back in the day about the ultimate gaming controller – that incorporated mouse-like accuracy with controller convenience and included, yes, trackball and touchpad like notions – into useful documentation that I could use to patent troll my way to millions!

The fact that you can configure those trackpads to both work like a joystick and like a regular trackpad is actually a pretty big deal… that way you can have analog movement and mouse precision…. Best of both worlds it would seem… pretty awesome stuff

They’re screwing up this controller just to make it ambidextrous. I wish they’d just put the ABXY back to the classic position (all accessible by the right thumb) and they’d have a 360-beater. As of right now, it’s miles inferior to the 360.

The buttons marked ABXY don’t have to be ABXY, and they aren’t meant to be analogous to the ones on the Xbox controller. You can have ABXY be regions on the right trackpad in the same positions ABXY would be on a 360 controller and still have a region in the middle for what would normally be pushing the right thumbstick in (or move it to a different button). Go read Tommy Refenes’ post about this: link to tommyrefenes.tumblr.com
e.g. “We configured the controller to play like an Xbox controller. So the left circle pad was once again used for the directional buttons, and the right circle pad was used as A, B, X, Y buttons in the orientation that you find on an Xbox Controller.” So that right trackpad could act as buttons AND as a stick at the same time, but keep in mind that they make sure there are a lot of physical buttons accessible without taking your thumb off the trackpad as well.

That would be very awkward. You’re trying to move the camera to the right, then you push too hard and accidentally click instead of pushing, activating your dodge move and and hurling yourself off a cliff (and in the game). But OK, I suppose it can emulate a 360 controller on its entirety then, including the D-pad, without even mapping anything to the weird central buttons (I guess squeezing the controller is a lot less weird and more intuitive than clicking the joysticks for R3 and L3).

Yeah, with a bit of luck the control schemes are flexible enough to allow for mode-switching of the haptic pads. The two pads (combined with the backside buttons) give loads of control possibility. You already have 4 different combinations of pressing the backside buttons: that gives you 8 haptic pads, each of which can be a mouse, or a bunch of buttons, or a joystick, or a higher sensitivty mouse, or a dial, or… And that’s without taking your thumbs of the pad, or even including the triggers/shoulders.

I don’t understand why most people act like it should replace the mouse and keyboard, while actually it’s just trying to take the ‘mouse/keyboard’ to the couch, but not replace your current desktop setup..

I’d much rather use this than have some sort of tabletop on my couch while trying to play point&click adventure games on the TV. Currently I either use a Wii-mote or this thing: link to ic.tweakimg.net

It is DEFINATELY intended to replace keyboard/mouse controls for games which do not currently support a sofa-friendly control method (Steam Big Picture stuff)

That is 101% why they’re making it.

The argument goes that a ‘Steambox under your TV/in your front-room with your sofa is pointless because only around 10% of Steam games support Big Picture – this is intended to enable most, if not all, of the rest.

I say GL to em – it’s not that I don’t think they can make something interesting, it’s more than I think they’ll struggle to

a – sell it to KBM hardcore types
b – make it for a price enough people can afford

Wireless 360 controllers are $50 and they have the benefit of MASSIVE production – this is considerably more complex than one of those and Valve cannot dream of selling the numbers MS do – that’s the real issue.

Modern console controllers are already designed around mimicking M&KB functionality as closely as possible without needing a desk. They don’t get close at all of course, but this thing doesn’t seem to be a whole lot closer to achieving it. They could make Civ5 control just as clumsily with a 360 pad as it does here if they really wanted to.

I was thinking the same thing. In the Civ 5 example the user was quickly swiping about 3 times to move the mouse across the screen. It really looked like any old track pad. The last game example was a bit better where both pads allowed for movement across the screen in pretty much one move, although it requires an input from both hands.

Tommy’s comments are most interesting because he talks about how he made SMB work with the 360 controller ‘entirely on feel’ – so if he’d had to make it for PC first, he’d have to have done all his work for KBM and other pads and even this thing.

That means – ladies and gentlemen – that developers will either have to spend a lot more time developing games OR we’ll get some nasty lowest-common-denomiator solution.

That’s my worry – you’re making developers have to work a bit harder to keep everyone on-board.

and gord forbid what happens when a community of players decide that people with one of the control methods have an unfair advantage and start demanding they are blocked/given their own leagues or whatever…

The amount of configurable controls and precision this thing has is pretty interesting. If consoles adopt such a control system, then maybe they’ll be able to get rid of the quite limited interfaces they have in their games, those interfaces often limit the console games. Maybe console games will then grow in complexity and move closer to the capabilities that PC games already have.

That’s the most nonsensical comparison I’ve seen yet. That’d be like saying thumbsticks are useless because if you use a full-size joystick with your thumb it’s imprecise and hard to use.
If Valve implements this well I think it will be pretty precise (after a bit of practice). Name one part of your body that you can (consciously) move more accurately than your thumb.

Don’t tell anyone, but trackpads and other mouse-replacements that are moved with thumbs and other fingers already exist. And work great. And that’s without any haptic feedback. If you really wanna know what it’s going to be like, get an old ball mouse, turn it upside down and operate the ball with your thumb. After an hour or so you’ll get the same precision you’ve always had when you used your whole hand.

To find out how this feels, tape your mouse to a cat and swing it round by the tail until someone calls the police on you. GG VALVE.

(Side note, out of curiosity, I tried moving my mouse just using my thumb, and it was actually about as precise as using my whole hand, aside from the whole not-having-my-fingers-near-the-buttons issue. I do have a pretty light mouse, though.)

Unfortunately, unless games start really jumping on board and fully implement this controller, you will probably need to keep your old controller handy. As the controller is going to be emulating mouse and keyboard for a lot of games, you are going to be stuck with using digital controls for a device with analog input. This isn’t too bad if you are playing a game where you are always on foot, but as soon as you add vehicles it becomes an absolutely horrid experience. I’m sure you could just use the left pad as a d-pad instead, but then you are missing out on one of the key advantages a game pad has.

I think they are making a mistake not including Xinput on these. I can’t see many multiplatform games accommodating these Steamrollers, as they normally don’t even bother with Direct Input nowadays. This means these will likely be stuck with emulation for most games outside of Valve’s own.

RSI means I can’t used mouse+keyboard for any game that requires me holding keys down (holding down a key for any length of time causes slowly-building pain). So that rules out using keyboard for shooters or just about any RPG I’ve come across. (No problem with RTS or TBS since they never seem to rely on you holding down a key for more than a second)

This means I’ve had to adapt at using Xbox controller for games like Half-Life, Bioshock, Dishonored, Mass Effect 2 etc. It works, but as so many have commented, aiming is sub-standard (although not impossible as many seem to think).

On the other hand, 360-degree movement using a controller is SO MUCH better than wasd (yay 8-directions max) – so even my RSI suddenly got better I’m not sure I’d jump at going back to kb+mouse.

Hm, do you mean action-RPGs? Old fashioned turn-based ones don’t seem like they’d require holding buttons down. Even if they did it seems like some sort of input hack that allowed you to provide input to toggle a virtual key seems like it would be achievable.

I guess I do. Bioware, Besthesda, Obsidian RPGs all require a lot of jogging about holding down W to get round places. Dragon Age Origins doesn’t actually – you can do it all with the mouse, which is how I got through that one. (It is a bit irritating running up hills though, since I mis-click is the different between “top of the hill” and “three feet forward”)

If Valve is so obsessed with making the traditional gamepads work with native PC games (not a bad thing, playing some slow-paced,cursor-driven games from the couch sounds good), why won’t they try to… I don’t know, DESIGN IMPROVED KEYBOARDS AND MICE? (sorry for the caps)
These devices aren’t perfect, and I’d be super interested to see what improvements Valve could bring to the table.

Depending on how good it feels I could probably see myself using this controller for Singelplayer-games in all genres. Multiplayer will be a no go though. But I could definitely see myself playing Portal 2 with this controller.

A couple of these, and drunken co-op each-player-has-half-of-both-controllers* Portal 2 will be even trickier/more fun! (Sometimes, I wonder if I bought 360 controllers for the wrong reason.)

Honestly, I’m most excited about these because they might just convince a few more developers that local co-op games will be played. The more PC gamers have controllers, the more people might think to make games that involve players having multiple of them.

* that is, by both players holding both controllers, player 1 has the blue portal trigger and movement stick of Atlas, and the orange portal trigger and aiming stick of P-body; player 2 has the inverse. Try it at home!

They selection of games used appear to have been very carefully selected. None of them require complex face button combinations combined with character rotation and movement at the same time. I’d like to see how they manage to make it work with something like Prince of Persia, Bayonetta, Assassin’s Creed, GTA V, Street Fighter IV or Splinter Cell.

In this thread, we make up games that use this controller, and then do no work whatsoever on the implementation.

I want several genres of game reinterpreted so that pressing on thumbpads is used for both walking *and* looking around, whereas dragging on thumbpads is used for *moving your character’s hands*. I’m thinking that dual-wielding guns this way would work a lot better than, say, holding a pair of Wiimotes. Certainly easier on the arms.

See, what I want to know is, when people cry “mouse and keyboard is still more accurate”, just what games are these people playing?

Are they still playing fast paced arena shooters like Quake, or Unreal Tournament? I wouldn’t be surprised if this controller is just a reflection of how slow shooters are these days. I’d imagine, on any public TF2/CS:GO server, someone using this controller could give people using a mouse and keyboard a run for their money.

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